India's poor Internet infra forces Ola to enable bookings through SMS

It will allow customers to book cabs from across many of Ola's categories -Micro, Mini, Prime and Lux, but not shared rides

India's spotty and slow Internet connectivity has forced Ola, one of the country's largest Internet companies, to use SMS to help customers in large metros book cabs when they're offline.

The use of this seemingly archaic technology solution was made as Ola saw nearly one in every ten bookings lost due to poor Internet connectivity. Despite the proliferation of high-speed 3G and 4G connectivity in most large Indian cities, the company says loss of connectivity is still a big issue.

"We know that poor or patchy internet connectivity is a common occurrence in India, as much as one in ten times. Since mobility, unlike e-commerce, is consumed on the go, it is important for us to address this need for our consumers," said Ankit Bhati, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Ola.

Ola, which has been piloting its 'Offline' feature in smaller towns over the past few months has now rolled out the feature across all metro cities, which contribute over 70 per cent of its bookings. The company said the feature will allow it to overcome the constraints of India's lacking network infrastructure.

Through the feature, customer will be prompted to book cabs via SMS when their phones are not connected to the Internet. Ola Offline will allow customers to book cabs from across many of Ola's categories —Micro, Mini, Prime and Lux, but not shared rides.

"Spotty 3G and 4G coverage also account for a fair amount of data connectivity issues, even in Tier 1 cities," Bhati added.

Ola isn't the first and only company to be affected by India's bad Internet connectivity. Firms such as FreeCharge and Paytm too have had long suffered from loss of connectivity on customer devices, forcing them to innovate different ways to authenticate payments. Before them it was Banks that faced a similar challenge.

Better connectivity has been one of the biggest demands from startups to the Indian government which has found a newfound obsession with such hi-tech companies.

India has consistently ranked among the countries with slowest Internet speeds in Asia, and the issue of spotty connectivity has even got the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to think up some innovative ways of penalising service providers. Yet call drops and bad connectivity continue to be big laggards for boosting business.

While the entry of players such as Reliance Jio, who've pumped in massive amounts of money to build world class infrastructure, might give India a much needed shot in the arm, it's rollout is still far too slow to feed the growing demands of India's fledgling Internet economy.

Ola previously offered customers the option to book cabs via phone call, but did away with it once smartphone penetration took off. Now, it seems that the company is going back to using age old technology to plug gaps in India's broken hi-tech infrastructure.

"Constraints in the current data and connectivity infrastructure, has paved way to the launch of this innovative feature for India," Bhati said.